While my friends are arguing about sexual harassment and similar things on twitter… I have arguments about use of alternative asset classes in public pensions and chat about William Blake. I prefer my twitter. :)

I heard there was a set of words
That the kids memed and confused the olds
But you don't really care for poems, do you?
Well it goes like this: the plums, the box,
The sweet cold taste, and the breakfast lost,
The baffling tweets reworking Carlos Williams

To be sure, it doesn’t involve public pensions, but it does involve William Carlos Williams, one of my favorite poets… partly because he has such memorizable poems.

Also, I like the song being spoofed.

POINT, COUNTERPOINT, COUNTERCOUNTERPOINT…LOOK GUYS, YOU’RE ALLPRETTY

I was thinking of doing a post on this, but eh. I’m not going to even quote any of this (right now). The only reason this caught my attention was the petulant Calpers post, which was too funny. You know, you could just ignore these guys. After all, it’s not like you really were addressing why a supposed 100% ARC payer had a fairly low funded ratio.

We’ll keep pretending the pensions cost less, as long as you stay part of the Ponzi pension scheme (as the UK actuaries like to say).

But if you leave, we’ll recognize the full cost. You know, the cost we should have been using to reflect how expensive these promises are.

Do they not realize that it doesn’t look good when you admit that you need younger members to keep the plan going along? To keep pretending you can pay less than what the promises are worth? Because there’s always a new sucker participant whose contributions will pay for the older ones… and as long as you keep having new people it never fails.